A comprehensive list of ways in which reality may be distorted by perception, by David Pearce

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“If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite.”  —William Blake

1. You don’t perceive the environment. There is no public world. Instead, your local environment partially selects your brain states, some of which are experienced as your external surroundings. Mind-independent reality is a speculative metaphysical inference, sadly a strong one, IMO. Contra William Blake (and Aldous Huxley), there are no see-though doors of perception in need of a good wash, just cranial prisons.

2. Whether you are awake or dreaming, your world-simulation is populated by zombies. When you are awake, these zombies are the avatars of sentient beings, but the imposters loom larger than their hypothetical real-world counterparts.

3. Your egocentric world-simulation resembles a grotesque cartoon. Within the cartoon, you are the hub of reality, the most important being in the universe…

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Andrés Gómez-Emilsson on Logarithmic Scales of Pleasure and Pain: Rating, Ranking, and Comparing Peak Experiences Suggest the Existence of Long Tails for Bliss and Suffering

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I briefly explain that while some distributions (e.g. the size of the leaves of a tree) follow a Gaussian bell-shaped pattern, many others (e.g. avalanches, size of asteroids, etc.) follow a long-tail distribution. Long-tail distributions have the general property that a large fraction of the volume is accounted for by a tiny percent of instances (e.g. 80% of the snow that falls from the mountain will be the result of the top 20% largest avalanches).

I then explain that based on previous research we have conducted at the Qualia Research Institute we have arrived at the tentative conclusion that the intensity of pleasure and pain follow a long-tail distribution. Why?

First, neural activity on patches of neural tissue follow log-normal distributions (an instance of a long-tail distribution).

Second, the extremes of pleasure and pain are so intense that they cannot conceivably be just the extremes of a normal distribution. This includes, on the positive end: Jhana meditation, 5-MeO-DMT peak experiences, and temporal lobe epilepsy (Dostoevsky famously saying he’d trade 10 years of his life for just a few moments of his good epileptic experiences). On the negative end, things like kidney stones, cluster headaches, fibromyalgia, and migraines top the charts of most intense pain.

And third, all of the quantitative analysis we conducted on a survey about people’s best and worst experiences showed that the ratings, comparisons, and rankings of such experiences was far more consistent with a long-tail distribution than a normal distribution.

I then conclude by saying that this is an *important*, *tractable*, and *neglected* cause.

1) Important because we may be able to reduce the world’s suffering by a significant amount if we just focus on preventing the most intense forms of suffering.

2) Tractable because there are already many possible effective treatments to these disorders (such as LSD microdosing for cluster headaches, and FSM for kidney stones).

3) And neglected because most people have no clue that pain and pleasure go this high. Most utilitarian calculus so far seems to assume a normal distribution for suffering, which is very far from the empirical truth. Bentham would recoil at the lack of an exponent term when additively normalizing pain scales.

I conclude by adding that in Effective Altruism there might be an implicit “youth” bias involved in the lack of knowledge of this phenomenon – due to the age of the people in the movement, most EA activists will not themselves have had intensely painful experiences. Thus, why it is so crucial to raise awareness about this topic in the community (it does not show up on its own). Simply put: because the logarithmic nature of pleasure and pain is *news* to most people in EA.

Video, Article, Presentation given at EA New York

David Pearce on what is the difference between perception and consciousness

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“Thus the existence of a real object outside me is never given directly in perception, but can only be added in thought to what is a modification of inner sense as its external cause, and hence can only be inferred.”
(Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 1781)

“All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.”
(Edgar Allan Poe)

“Perception” is a useful word. It’s also systematically misleading. This is because the term suggests that each of us enjoys direct access to our local surroundings, including one’s extra-cranial body. “Cross-modally matched real-time egocentric world-simulation” might be more apt; alas, it’s a mouthful. Either way, the external environment may be inferred; it’s not accessed. The mind-independent world powerfully selects the subjective content of one’s waking world-simulation; the mind-independent world doesn’t create it.

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Synesthesia as unusual sense, by Craig Weinberg

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“The fact of synesthesia (the experience of multiple and unusual sense modalities associated with events that are commonly experienced with one sense modality) shows that there need not be any connection between physical conditions and consciousness. Someone might play a piano and see musical notes at the same time, and that would be a form of synesthesia, but they are still seeing something visible and hearing something audible. I think it’s useful to distinguish visible (Aesthetic Qualia) from optical (Anesthetic Physical Mechanism) and audible (AQ) from sonic (APM). All sense qualia can be separated from physics or information this way.”

Post by Craig Weinberg

If we are sentient robots, without will, sentience is not useful. And if it’s useful, how can it be?

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When it is stated that sentience has a purpose, this idea is usually explained by indicating that sentience is useful because it motivates doing certain things and avoiding others. In addition, in this explanation, it is usually indicated that sentience motivates but does not force. That is, under this explanation, sentience is not simply the cause and behavior the consequence, but sentience motivates to strive to make the best possible decision, under the threat of pain and the reward of pleasure. According to this explanation, sentient beings would make better decisions and will be selected (“better”, from an evolutionary point of view).

But we can also consider that it is possible that we are sentient robots, but without will, that we simply do what we have been programmed for, even though we have the feeling that we make free decisions, so that sentience really does not play any role in the evolution in form of motivation.

So, is sentience useful or inevitable?

My best intuition is that sentience is probably inevitable when certain conditions are met. So, sentience would be inevitable. Not useful. But let’s assume for a moment that sentience is useful. If sentience were useful, then sentience must incorporate some element that goes beyond classical physics, to be really useful. For example, related to quantum physics or the multiverse.

Why?

Because if sentience had a positive effect (in the form of motivation) on survival, in some way that can be explained by classical chemistry and physics, for example, thinking faster, taking better decisions, or being able to escape running faster than a predator, this behavior, that would be evolutionarily selected, would have to compete with another behavior that would also be evolutionarily selected, which is to do exactly the same, following the laws of chemistry and classical physics, but without the sentience.

I will give an example to try to illustrate all this.

Suppose we have a DNA chain that “reproduces as much as possible” and that follows the laws of classical physics. This chain does not feel.

By the way, when I say that the chain “reproduces as much as possible” I am not assigning agency, but summarizing in that phrase what is happening on a physical level. That chain that “reproduces as much as possible” is simply matter following the laws of physics. The phrase “reproduces as much as possible” is a summary way of describing what is happening.

We also have a second strand of DNA also formed by physical particles and obviously also that “reproduces as much as possible.” However, this DNA chain does feel: it feels pleasure every time it reproduces and frustration if it can not. Which motivates it to reproduce as much as possible.

This second strand of DNA is motivated to reproduce, but in what physical way would it be able to do it better than the chain that does not feel, and therefore is not “motivated”?

Whichever way we imagine that this second chain can do something better than the first chain, if it is following the laws of physics, it is something that chains like the first one could also perform. That is, evolution could always create chains that do not feel, like the first one, and that would have that characteristic of being more efficient, like the second one. Then both types of chain could exist: those that feel and those that do not feel. Motivation would not have any differential advantage.

If instead of DNA chains we think about complete individuals like us, the example works the same.

Obviously, if we consider that from a certain level of complexity or when certain functions appear, all the chains (or individuals) feel, then it would seem that sentience plays a role in evolution, but simply what would be happening is that sentience is a byproduct of something else. And it is that other thing (complexity, function) the thing that is being selected, not sentience. Sentience would not be useful: it would be inevitable.

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The systematic approach to suffering by Robert Daoust

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“The study of pleasure and pain belongs to the province of the political philosopher; for he is the architect of the end, with a view to which we call one thing bad and another good without qualification. ” – Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics

The systematic approach to suffering will present a collection of lists, a series of enumerations as exhaustive as possible concerning suffering, causes of suffering, people and organizations who cause suffering, factors of difficulty in work against excessive suffering, ideas of strategy, solutions, people and organizations who contribute to solve excessive suffering, documents interesting the systematic approach to suffering, and many other lists.

All those inventories, mostly without precedent, call for a new type of gathering and classification work. And the interrelationships among all those elements will also call for new specialties. Moreover, it will be necessary to develop standardized procedures for measuring individual or collective suffering. Those measurements will be used to guide the work of prevention, reduction, suppression, eradication.

Such a wider and more precise mapping of the field will better inform us on what is occurring and where we should go, will better prepare us to react to the evolution of the global problematique (for instance, it would make it possible to detect and control the harmful consequences of certain solutions, or to use advisedly new shrewd tactics). It will make it easier for us to find our way through the abundance, the vastitude and the complexity of the subject.

The systematic approach to suffering proposes a general plan of solution to the whole problem of excessive suffering; it proposes which steps would lead to a global victory; it proposes a framework apt to accomodate all collaborations and to organize usefully their theoretical or practical contributions; it offers “an operational environment supporting the mutual reinforcement of the approaches and the projects of solution, too often isolated and vulnerable at present.

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Where Should Humanity Steer Sentience? Examining 8 Potential Directions

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The list of eight options below is not intended to be a complete list. Rather, it is intended to be a reasonably likely list of options that people might discuss in the near term.

For the sake of this article, the word pleasure is being used as a broad term to indicate all preferable conscious experiences, from finishing a great oil painting, to eating ice cream, to reading a good book, to feeling peace of mind, to having sex, and so on – depending one’s personal preferences, cultural background, etc. Suffering, likewise, is used to represent all gradients of unpleasant conscious states, from being dumped in a relationship, to stubbing your toe, to being eaten alive by hyenas.

The circle to the right represents a relative change in the amount of sentient experience in the world (in the increased or decreased or unchanged size of the circle), or in the relative change in the balance of pleasure and suffering in the world (in the changed degrees of red or blue in the circle).

The presence of the right-facing arrow indicates a movement from where we are now in our pleasure/suffering ratio, to one of the eight different directions that we’ll be exploring.

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How a nervous system operates without giving rise to an experience

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In our bodies, if our knee is lightly tapped, our leg moves automatically (with no intention on our part) and independently of the experience of the tap that we sense.  The information that originates in our knee, with the tap, splits up and moves through two separate pathways: one path goes to our brain through the spinal cord, where it is processed to produce the corresponding experience; the other path involves a different circuit, going through the spinal cord to the muscles that operate the leg, without ever reaching the brain. In the second path, the information takes a much shorter direct route to enable our body to react quickly to the stimulus (‘reflex arc’). There is a good reason why this dual mechanism exists. There are cases where some part of the body will be endangered by a slow reaction to an external threat. If we had to think about moving because of pain, rather than responding automatically, we might not act quickly enough to avoid harm.

What is relevant here is that the information transmitted through this ‘reflex arc’ is never experienced because it is never processed by a central nervous system. The non-centralized nervous systems of some animals operate just as reflex arcs do. Information is transmitted from the cells receiving certain stimuli to other cells which must be activated, without any involvement of subjective experience. In these cases, there is a merely mechanical transmission of information. Such reactions are not an indication of sentience.

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An overview of wagers for reducing future suffering

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“Pascal’s wager is a famous argument for why one should believe in God. If God exists, then eternal life in heaven or hell is at stake, but if God doesn’t exist, one’s belief does not matter much – so one should wager on the former. (The validity of this argument has been discussed at length.)

More generally, whenever we consider two hypotheses H1 and H2 about the world, the stakes may be higher in one of the two cases – say, if H1 is true. This is a reason to act as if H1 is true, even if it is not most likely. For instance, the precautionary principle emphasises caution towards potentially harmful innovations (e.g. a new medicine) as long as we have substantial uncertainty.

In this post, I will consider wagers that are relevant to effective altruism – that is, hypotheses that would allow us to have a particularly large impact. I’m most interested in reducing future suffering, but many of these wagers also apply to other goals.”

Richard Dawkins about suffering in nature

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“The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive; others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear; others are being slowly devoured from within by rasping parasites; thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst and disease.”

— Richard Dawkins